11-cs01-data
Professor Shannon Ellis
2/14/23
CS01: Right-To-Carry (Data)
Q&A
Q:
A:
Course Announcements
Due Dates:
Coming Thursday
Agenda
- Background
- Data Intro
- Wrangle
- Combine!
Background
Right To Carry Laws1
Right to Carry (RTC) Laws - “a law that specifies if and how citizens are allowed to have a firearm on their person or nearby (for example, in a citizen’s car) in public.”2
RTC Laws (cont’d)
- The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the right to “keep and bear arms”. The amendment was ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights.
- There are no federal laws about carrying firearms in public.
- These laws are created and enforced at the US state level. States vary greatly in their laws about the right to carry firearms.
- Some require extensive effort to obtain a permit to legally carry a firearm, while other states require very minimal effort to do so. An increasing number of states do not require permits at all.
RTC Laws Across the US
RTC Laws Across the US
Questions
- What is the relationship between right to carry laws and violence rates in the US?
- What is the effect of multicollinearity on coefficient estimates from linear regression models when analyzing right to carry laws and violence rates?
The Data
The Data: Source
Two contradictory analyses:
John J. Donohue et al., Right‐to‐Carry Laws and Violent Crime: A Comprehensive Assessment Using Panel Data and a State‐Level Synthetic Control Analysis. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16,2 (2019).
David B. Mustard & John Lott. Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns. Coase-Sandor Institute for Law & Economics Working Paper No. 41, (1996).
The Data
Two Analyses
Limitations
- The analyses differed in variables used; we will not be recreating either analysis in full
- We’ll account for either the adoption or lack of adoption of a permissive right-to-carry law in each state; we will not account for differences in the level of permissiveness of the laws.
- Race is included here (as it was in initial analysis); however, any association between demographic variables (indicating the proportion of the population from specific race and age groups) and violent crime does not necessarily indicate that the two are linked causally.
Packages
Raw Data
There are a whole bunch of different data files we’ll be using…
- creates a “data” sub-directory in your current working directory (if it does not already exist)
- creates a “raw” sub-directory within “data”; contains the directories with the data
👉 Your Turn: Load the data into RStudio. It will take a while…so just let it get started.
To Be Continued…
